


half bloom, full root

by claireistheangelofhellskitchen



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: BAMF Claire Temple, F/M, Female Character of Color, Female-Centric, Gen, Graphic Description, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Transphobia, Internal Conflict, Introspection, Trans Female Character, non-canon trans character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 12:29:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8208073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claireistheangelofhellskitchen/pseuds/claireistheangelofhellskitchen
Summary: Claire muses on things that she wants, but shouldn't.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, ladies, gentlemen, and variations therupon! This is my first ever fanfic so please give as much constructive feedback as you possibly can! Or if you you don't wanna comment, please kudos!  
> Hope you enjoy!  
> P. S. I am cisgender so if I portrayed transgender character insensitively or incorrectly, please let me know immediately :)

Claire dreams.

Often feeling snagged in the webs of medical gauze, drowning in haze of the stink of infection, subpar coffee, and chemicals. Now more then ever, now that she doesn't have to watch for a tall, dark, not-stranger slinking through her fire escape. Now she doesn't have to want him there any more. (She does want him there sometimes). Sometimes she still keeps her window cracked.

But out of all of it, the trunk of a taxi, the gore, the soft horrible thump of flesh and flesh, glass on her floor, the shards of one kiss embedded in her lips, it's not what she remembers most. She remembers eggs. How cliche.

But as her sore fingers mindlessly fall into the pattern of repetition, she lets the ghosts of his fingers on her lower lip, her aorta, her shoulders, all cradled gently by such violent skin. She remembers the eggs like a sunset, if their whirlwind whatever-it-was had allowed for such a trope. Or if he could see the purple in the horizon as much as he could smell the violet under her skin.

After the blisters bloom on her soles, she recalls bubbles in the whites of the sunny-side-up. A faint dainty yellow of her swollen bruise mimics little golden puffs of yoke. After a dragging shift, she begins to see blank amber retinas in the depths of her latte, some kind of hellish rorscharch.

She aches for more ghosts. She wonders if the memory of more fingers, fingers elsewhere and ever more would burn her worse or ease the pain. She numbers the times he spread a fire through her heart and how much damage that warmth inflicted. The remembers a man so wounded that his very bleeding made injuries in those who tried to heal him. She didn't want to heal him, she wasn't so arrogant (as he was). She didn't have a crown of thorns (his brow was poked and scabbed) or a throne of spikes (he clung to his torment like a lover...more then any living comfort).

Sometimes she would lie awake and ask herself, how much of her bleeding heart cried out for a bloodier companion? And if her arms would neither cage his ferocity nor soothe his bones, why?

And she knows the truth. She wants to save people. In a real way. She left her rosaries behind in the pew a long time ago, but those cranberry beads still knotted her up in a cord of blame. She doesn't believe it but she still feels it.

Penance.

No, not penance for a tithe unpaid or a fib transversing the scale of white, grey, black (how familiar this color scheme is to her now). She does not crawl on bare knees anymore for someone else's mistakes or her own human status.

If she does harm she will reckon with a broken medical oath and not the cold eyes of a stained glass man, flat and sharp and looking down on her. And most certainly, her elbows will never kiss the pavement for the stubble on her jaw and upper lip at dawn and noon, or the dark cloisters at her pits, belly, junk, the black vines beginning to creep into the wall of her flat chest.

Never for the needle pricks and the sting of chemicals changing her muscles and bones into an honest mold, the extra hour of razored maintenance, the lump of anatomy not emotion that sat in her trachea (the bump glided over by his thumb, rubbed like a pearl).

Never for being Claire and leaving Clarence in the pew alongside the rosary, twisting themselves into knots like the string of noose-like beads.

Never.

But another kind of penance. For wanting more. For doing less. For doing too much. For not being perfect. For knowing that she can't be and still longing for effort of a saint. For the sin of knowing the right thing to do and going with her gut. Even when she was right. Especially when she was wrong.

She still isn't certain that she is or was right. The bat in her hands felt right but the concave in her attacker's skull didn't. The blood on her hands felt justified (metaphorically) but wrong when scrubbed out of the jeans of gang-members who whispered of a faceless demon (literally). The small boy back in his father's arms, shyly describing the ebony silhouette who snatched him from the jaws of evil; that was right and good. And the amount of inches that the blade slid into the kidnapper's eye socket, that felt...that felt alright, mostly.

She remembers how she didn't believe the torturer enjoyed it, but how often she had fantasizes about doing the same things and worse to others; every set of stitches for a "fall", every broken wrist from a "sports accident", every ugly shade and shape wrought on the innocent by a monsters claws.

She has smiled when imagining sewing eyelids together for every punch, wrenching a socket out for every bone crack. And she begins to question where the lines even starts and how easy it becomes to step over it.

She wants to fix the word without kicks and screams (hers or others). She knows that hollow barrels and glaring bright badges won't suture the world's tears any more then the hollow metal potluck bowl will mend her grandfather's arthritis or ancient onionskin platitudes will stem the flow from a slashed vein.

She wants to use her hands, every inch of her heart, every fraction of time to make the world a better place. And after several years, you know that your grip will cramp and you will extend your lunch break by five minutes just for one more second of reprieve and you will lock away a section of your heart to have one patch of ground that hasn't been salted by the stress and the bitterness and the frustration. But you will still want to try and you will still be unable to do it.

And she gets frostbite from the memory of those lips, those cruel and kind fingers, that particular shade of amber, because she knows that if not for the things she believes (needs to believe), she will dive so much farther off the edge then he ever could've. 

But since she cannot hear the gurgle of a distant pipe, or the hesitation in a burglar's pulse, so she would plummet to her death. And she is not quite as enamored with pain anymore as she once was, because (as much as she understands the clasp of his embrace on the cross) she has tasted the sweet lure of martyrdom but has also stopped swallowing it long enough that she can fully appreciate its sour aftertaste.

If she has a sin, it is that she loves being intact more then the idea of something having a piece of her in its teeth.

And she can sleep with that just fine.

 


End file.
